Apply Funding-Items

SOLICIT FUNDING FOR YOUR RESEARCH

There are few institutions with rather unlimited resources that would permit realising practically any reasonable research plan. It is far more common that the financial resources of your institute are insufficient to support your study at the extent you would like to make it realised. In that case, you need to start looking for research funding from external sources. This can prove to be a most frustrating experience, however, if after several attempts you fail to raise enough funds and need to abandon your plans.

This need not necessarily happen to you, because there are a lot of "preventive measures" that can be taken to increase the probability of your proposal to be successful. To be successful in your efforts, you need to take care of a series of actions before and while writing your proposal. This is particularly important, because the competition of the usually scarce funding has become increasingly tough.

During the past 40 years as active researcher, we have acquired a substantial experience on fund raising for research, both national and international funding. SMW Consultants is ready to to share with you our expertise how to make successful applications to both national and international research funding bodies. This, if anything, is team work, where you and SMW need to work in close collaboration to reach the optimal results. There are several items, however, in which you can ask SMW Consultants to assist you.

Before anything else, we need to identify the potential funding sources that might be willing to give funding to the type of study you have in mind. In each country, there are usually several organisations for research funding, but you need to identify the potential candidates just for you study. It is rather evident that organisations supporting studies e.g. on cardiovascular diseases do not fund you, if your research is focused on skin diseases or e.g. cancer.

Once identified the potential sources, the logical next step is to check the eligibility of your project for that particular funding. Many funding bodies have different restrictions and particular rules concerning the types of the study likely to be funded. Sometimes these rules are quite restricting and might exclude your plans straightforward. Becoming familiar of these restrictions would safe you a lot of effort made for nothing. Remember to identify also the deadlines for proposals that are currently applicable.

After completing these two steps, you have identified a few targets that look promising or even highly promising to continue the process. The next step then is to get familiar with the application procedure, which is different for each of the agencies. Some are relatively simple and straightforward, whereas others (particularly those of the major international bodies) can be quite complicated and time-consuming. Even the instructions might seem an overwhelming obstacle to an inexperienced even to make the effort. SMW Consultants are not discouraged by any of such instructions, because used to complete similar procedures several times. And successfully!

Once you decided to proceed with your proposal, the next (and crucial) step is to complete the application procedure. Most importantly, this means a writing of your study plan according to the given instructions, but also filling a set of forms requesting the key information about your organisation and other related items. Filling the forms is a purely technical procedure, but writing a clear and solid study proposal is far from a technical procedure. You need to know certain "tricks" how to give your proposal a high impact and make it "attractive" for those who are evaluating the applications. We at SMW have experience and expertise, how to do that. If you decide, we can write your application, working interactively with you.

The best reward of all this major intellectual input is the favourable decision from the funding organisation; ...."your proposal has been accepted for funding". For a researcher, it is difficult to receive a better feedback of your work.

However, the efforts and input that you need to put in this project do not by any means stop at this point. Those who give you the funds usually want to monitor the progress of your work, and want to see the results. This monitoring of the project can follow different policies, but usually some kind of periodical reports are requested. You do the work, but SMW Consultants can write these scientific progress reports, if you want.

Because all research projects are different, also these solutions are always tailored according to each individual case. Successful completion necessitates a high-level expertise, and these procedures are extremely time-consuming. For this reason, SMW Consultants is also ready to negotiate on different mechanisms, how to compensate our input in each project, on tailor-made basis.